Mogtalk interview with yoshi p

[kikix12]

*deep breath*

Well, now I have what to specifically discuss. So here goes.

This is a MMO, the underlying mechanics are that of a turn-based MMORPG in "server ticks" of about 3 seconds. Because of latency in North America, you can have players anywhere from 6ms in California to 500ms in Australia and Russia. Only the underlying turned-based mechanics allow such players to play together and not have the person with the fastest connection wipe the floor with everyone else.

This is an issue that all multiplayer games have. Yet playing multiplayer, not necessarily with your neighbors only, is exactly how sport games are played the most. The latency doesn't affect them?! I'm sure it does.

I'm also afraid that turn-based or action-heavy in term of latency means almost nothing. Almost, because so long as the cooldown of abilities is above the latency or if its client-sided there is no difference. Only in games where cooldown is below latency AND server based (like Blade and Soul) is there a difference because low-latency players can spam more abilities in the same time.
"Turn-based" style, or rather, active ATB style, is no different in how much it hurts players with high latency. The fact that I can use abilities every 2.5sec instead of every 0.5sec doesn't change the fact that when I see fast attacks markings (like Titan's wrath of the land or whatever it's called), it is often too late for me to move out of them before server will register a hit, because the time the information travels to me and then back to the server is about as long as the charge of the attack on worse days.
The cooldowns that are long are there to reduce the necessary physical and mental ability to make fast decisions and quickly use varying buttons. Nothing more, nothing less. It's got nothing to do with latency. Or at least...it does nothing for latency.

Now, for Blitzball, or any other sport game, requires a real-time mechanic that can't be cheesed by the person with the fastest connection. So you would literately have players pointing to places on the field and pick "move,dribble, pass (to player), shoot (goal)" etc, and you would need whatever number of people are required to play the game. In FFX there were also stat boost/debuffs. Realistically FFX's Blitzball was also just turn-based. It was not in any way like the other sports games.

Wrong. Again, you are assuming that a sport game requires something that it does not. As you said yourself, original blitzball was not entirely real-time (it was not turn-based either, though). It had "battles" which were basically a rock-paper-scissors matches, but the movement was real-time. And that's actually not entirely uncommon. I do agree though that developers would need to work on minimizing the latency issue for it especially, but some degree would not be gamebreaking as you make it believe.
As for however many players...it's anywhere from 1 player to a number of players equal to the amount of characters on the field. Unless developers will decide to give it specific number. That's the whole point of computer games. To provide AI for whatever characters there are no players for.

So the closest you will get to anything would be slower than the PvP games, and not as a fun as a result unless it was "solo", a la the squadrons.

PvP suffers from latency as well, and yet there are fans, despite many people considering its design rather poor. Why would blitzball require perfect solution to latency issues when nothing else (other sport games, other activities in FFXIV etc.) does? It's too bad, but that's how MMO's go. High latency=sucky gameplay. It's unavoidable and it affects EVERYTHING in EVERY MMO game. People like that have to deal with it somehow or...change game. And I'm saying that while I myself suffer from high latency.

So between actions, you'd be allowed to move, but as soon as someone has the ball, or tries to intercept it, there would have to be some QTE for the success/fail action.

And...what's the problem with that?! It was like this in the original blitzball and it still did garner some fans. It's all about how the game as a whole will be designed. This game flow itself in no way is unfun.

Like I don't realistically see any way of pulling this off and it being fun, regardless of what you think the value of Blitzball is itself.

There is no value in blitzball in and off itself. It's all about how it will be made. I just in general like "combat" sports where there are actual super-attacks and such, despite disliking sports in general. So it is something I may be interested in depending on how it will be implemented.

Look at the Triple Triad, Lord of Verminion and the Chocobo Racing.

Lord of Verminion is a poorly-made strategy game. Something I said in this very thread is a horrible idea. A strategy game NEVER should be made as a mini-game in anything due to how specific they are in their target audience. And even as a strategy game, its implementation is truly horrid. I order the minions to ATTACK a monster, yet they pass it, taking that order to attack as an order to move to where that monster was at the moment of the click. This is not how strategy games work for a reason. If I order to move, they should move. If I order to attack, they should attack, following the target till one side dies or I change the order.

Triple Triad isn't half-bad when you feel like burning some time on something, especially since you can cancel it (when going against NPC's at least). It suffers for multiple reasons though.
1) NPC's cheat. They have no limit to how many cards of what rank they can use at all. That makes the game lose value. No one likes playing against cheaters. Rules being equal for all are EXTREMELY important in a card game.
2) The deck setup is locked behind achievements. That means that you will completely suck until after you put forth quite a fair deal of effort. This however, together with the above cheating issue, means that the early stages of the game are horribly unfun all the while that stage is unavoidable. As a game done in spare time, that's unacceptable.
3) Triple Triad obviously doesn't allow you to 'progress' in the context of the game itself. At the same time, it's impossible to play the game outside of very few designated areas. That means that players, when they have a bit of spare time waiting for someone to come back after going to open the door for example, simply cannot play it. Why, I'd be more than happy to play triple triad in dungeon while waiting for someone disconnected to log back in, or waiting for someone to return after having to go do something etc. But I can't. And I can't do it in any other situation where I would want to, either. Either my progression needs to suffer (aka. I need to stop doing everything else and go to specific places to play it) or I can only play against cheating AI...which requires me to go to specific places as well, obviously.

Chocobo races?! Well, they are just too simple. And too RPG'ish for races. The chocobos don't react to orders properly, some chocobos can be vastly faster etc. It just cannot be fun as a multiplayer game due to that.

The "call a play" coach mechanic is easier to pull off, and not requiring assembling enough players to play, it could be done as 1-on-1, so whoever has the ball, you get a QTE of "pass/shoot/dribble" and that pretty much makes it work like it did in FFX.

Player amount never was an issue. It's no different from FIFA and other sport games. And those sport games certainly are no couch-based games. Yes, giving commands is one way to play it. I don't dismiss it either so long as it does have actual active elements to it. So long as I see the players as they flow by, they react to my commands etc. It's just a bit different control scheme there and it does not turn into strategy game either. But you seem to be misunderstanding what a sport game needs.

But this is going to be something that takes a long time, you're not going to play a match and then logoff. If your "team" never logs on again, then what? Start over? What if your new team sucks? What if you get d/c'd?

Again, you are assuming that this game will need more than one player per team, while there is no reason to believe that being the case. Player would just control any one character while being able to give commands of sorts to all character, even those they do not control at the time. And all problems are solved. You will always be logged on when you log on clearly, and that's all you need for ranking. Of course, it is possible for the game to permit multiple players per team. Then it turns into something akin to any other PvP. Why would it need to be given special treatment?! You got disconnected...so what?! You can get disconnected in PvP and suffer for it too. Too bad. It sucks, but can't be helped. At least the game can replace your character with AI if it is multi-player game, or "pause" it if its not, with an auto-surrender if you do not log in within a minute or so (unless there are other players on your team that will just have to take the burden if they don't want to surrender).

Hence, my point of I don't see any kind of "realtime" sport being viable here. It would have to be all single-rounds, not tournaments, and if you just PUG it, you stand no chance of actually getting anywhere since people could form "static" teams.

No wonder you don't see it if you just assumed it would be in a very specific way, while completely ignoring the fact that nothing is set in stone. Now, it would be a bit more reasonable if you assumed it would be a faithful representation of blitzball from FFX, but no. Your idea of how it would HAVE to work have nothing in common with it but the name and swimming in a dome, all the while assuming all the worse case scenarios. Sorry, but you are simply overlooking way too many things in the very limited view of sport games you seem to have.
1) There is no reason why it could be played with one person per team.
2) There is no reason why it couldn't have "time stops" for battles, to give few seconds to make decisions.
3) There is no reason why, if there would be teams, it wouldn't depend on those teams logging in. That's how statics work after all.

[KisaiTenshi]

Well, now I have what to specifically discuss. So here goes.

This is an issue that all multiplayer games have. Yet playing multiplayer, not necessarily with your neighbors only, is exactly how sport games are played the most. The latency doesn't affect them?! I'm sure it does.

Please show me where there is a MMO-FIFA Online. There isn't.

Sports games was the incentive for "4-player" console designs. You know what's funny, EA FIFA itself introduced a "solo story" campaign. They also only introduced female players in the 2016 years version... you know after having 20 versions without them. FIFA had an "online" game, it never got out of BETA. Instead they came out with a Mobile app, and we all know the kind of rubbish puts out for mobile.

Point is, there is no real way of making a real-time sport game within the confines of the FFXIV engine, nor has there ever been a successful real-time/action game that hasn't been plagued with cheaters and bots. Like just tampering with the nagle algorithm (TcpAckFrequency and TCPNoDelay to 1 in windows) gives you an advantage in MMO games that players may not otherwise have. Living in California or Montreal gives you an advantage or disadvantage depending which data center you're in.

No wonder you don't see it if you just assumed it would be in a very specific way, while completely ignoring the fact that nothing is set in stone. Now, it would be a bit more reasonable if you assumed it would be a faithful representation of blitzball from FFX, but no. Your idea of how it would HAVE to work have nothing in common with it but the name and swimming in a dome, all the while assuming all the worse case scenarios. Sorry, but you are simply overlooking way too many things in the very limited view of sport games you seem to have.
1) There is no reason why it could be played with one person per team.
2) There is no reason why it couldn't have "time stops" for battles, to give few seconds to make decisions.
3) There is no reason why, if there would be teams, it wouldn't depend on those teams logging in. That's how statics work after all.

Nothing is set, at all. You asked, I answered, then you assumed things I had not said. You asked why we couldn't have a real time sports game like FIFA, and that was how I answered it.

There's 4 scenarios

1) There is no player involvement, thus no fun, eg Retainer ventures, squadron missions. It's a collection game.
2) There is single-player vs NPC team, thus being pointless in a MMO context just like Triple Triad vs NPC's. If you want all the rewards you have to find all the players and play it thousands of times.
3) There is 1 on 1, basically "coach" mode where you essentially have a QTE of 3 seconds (same length that QTE for Shinryu is) to tell the player what to do, and the game server has to decide if that is a success or fail depending on issuing a command, ignoring a command, or which command makes sense. Some kind of tournament could be designed around this, but people would just throw it like Verminion to get rewards.
4) There is team vs team, which requires multiple players, just like existing duties, to be formed, but no tournament can be designed around. There's also nothing stopping teams from organizing just to throw it as well here.

It's not simple. There a issues with existing mini-games and existing PvP that need to be addressed, otherwise we're just extending those problems to more content, and that content will get played once and never again by most players, if not ignored entirely.

eg
- Throwing the match needs to be solved (Also a problem in PvP)
- Disconnecting to force a throw of the match needs to be solved
- Bot detection needs to be done (which is a problem in existing PvP)
- Some way of forming "static" teams that can persist beyond one play.

Like the last thing is probably the easiest to solve, but hear me out. There are already FC's and Linkshells in the game. The solution here is for a cross-server "team" being setup/signed up through a draft process like in an actual sports system. You select an "A League" and a "B League" which represent different leagues, of which you want to form a team with. "A Leagues" are cross-server, "B Leagues" are your server only. You start blitzball with no other players and a NPC team to teach you the basics, and it gives you a score of which position it thinks you should play (you can change your mind at this point.) Your draft score ensures that other teams can't just pick every best score either, as there will be a cap (eg can't have a team of all 100's.) On subsequent tournaments your score is re-evaluated if you decide to disband.

Then the game will either assign you to a team where there is a spot open for that position, or you can wait and form a team with other players you know. From that point forward all Blitzball games are played with the same players and matched against teams of the same skill level until tournament time. Then everyone has to be logged on for like 2-4 hours for the tournament to play out, and skipping out, drops your team out of the tournament entirely. If your team was assembled by PUG, then at the beginning and ending of each round you will be asked if you wish to proceed with your existing team and if you say no, the team is dissolved, and your team is withdrawn from the tournament. If someone d/c's, the tournament round will be paused for 5 minutes (timeout), at which point the team with the d/c'd player will get a "replace (player) with a free agent?" prompt and a list of available players online for that position will come up, and their W/L score up to the point they were withdrawn or eliminated from the tournament.

I'm not much of a sports-game player, and I don't really know, or care, how existing sports games deal with multiplayer, but suffice it to say if SE is hellbent on adding every minigame from FF's past to FFXIV, they really need to put more thought into it than the single-player minigames they were derived from. I don't know if these mini games were popular in Japan, but I was someone who ignored all the mini-games in the single-player FF games, primarily because they didn't advance the story. FFX's blitzball was a little different, I didn't care for it, but it was relevant because the main character, and Wakka was supposedly great at it and to get Wakka's final weapon you had to grind through it. I don't see similar rewards coming out of this for FFXIV.

Do we really want another source of grinding for tomes? Or getting "blitzball i375(BiS) gear" ? None of the other minigames give you anything that valuable.